Halloween

     This week is the last day of parent/teacher conferences, we have an assembly, and we will have a Halloween party on Friday.
      After careful consideration and assessment of my students' spelling I have decided to begin a spelling program. This Friday your child will come home with 5 spelling words on a sheet with their definitions. The sheet has space to practice writing the words in sentences. This is NOT homework! It is simply a practice sheet if you wish to use it. The students will be quizzed on the 5 words next Thursday, November 5th. They will need to spell the word correctly and use it correctly in a sentence. Then, Friday, November 6th your child will come home with 5 new words (they will repeat any words they spell incorrectly). Thank you so much in advance for your help! If you have any questions or concerns please feel free to email me.

Reader's Workshop
     We will conclude our Character unit by exploring the types of conflict our characters face in fiction texts, and how that conflict changes our characters. We will also work on this in our book groups as we finish our first chapter books together.

Writing Workshop
     This week we will choose a final writing topic for our first published personal narratives. We will work on crafting interesting leads and using our storyteller's voice while drafting. We will also continue to work on writing paragraphs.

Math
      This week will be all about subtraction! We will review how to subtract with regrouping by using place value blocks and then moving to pencil and paper. We will also work on subtraction across zeros. Thursday we will dedicate to problem solving, and we will take a chapter test on Friday.

Science
     Our plants are developing nicely! We have been tracking their progress every day by making observations and taking measurements. This week we will learn about the importance of bees in pollination and a plant's life cycle. We will pollinate our plants using real bees! Finally, we will identify the parts of a flower and how they function in the pollination process.

Word Work
     We will continue to learn how to use the dictionary this week. It is such a useful tool, and the class has really impressed me with their ability to use the guide words to find an entry word. We will also work with adjectives.

Thank you to our Mystery Reader Mrs. Godlewski!

Week of October 19th

    This week we will have our second day of parent/teacher conferences on Thursday. We have about 20 minutes available to us for this conference, but please don't think this is our only opportunity to discuss your child. I am always more than willing to meet with you, or exchange emails if you have any concerns or just want to check-in!

Reader's Workshop

     We are in the midst of our character unit. We are reading The Tale of Despereaux and analyzing our main characters' actions, dialog, feelings, and thoughts. The students are using textual evidence to help support their thinking. We are also meeting in small book groups, and working on identifying character traits with textual evidence. 

Writer's Workshop

    We have learned how to write a paragraph, and we will continue to practice this skill this week. I hope you saw a difference in our Friday Letters this weekend. We worked very hard to write two well planned and organized paragraphs. 

     We will also continue to work on our personal narrative unit. The students will bring home their writer's notebooks Monday night to write an entry for homework. 

Science

    We are making observations about our plants. This week we will learn the difference between seed leaves and true leaves, and how to identify them on our plants. We will also chart our plant's growth spurt. 

Math

     We have completed the second unit and we took a chapter test on Friday. This test will come home on Monday night for the students to correct and return by Friday. Overall, I was very impressed with the scores on this test! 

     This week we will work on addition with regrouping. This is a review concept from second grade. We will spend the first few days of the week using place value blocks for the students to understand the concept behind regrouping. Then, we will move to pencil and paper practice. By the end of the week we will progress to word problems. 

Have a wonderful week!

A few photos from the last two weeks...

We planted our Wisconsin Fast Plants.

We welcomed Mrs. Dievendorf as our Mystery Reader.

We enjoyed a presentation from the Elsmere Fire Department.

Mrs. Kowalsky was our Mystery Reader last week.

Week of October 5th

    We have a full week of learning ahead of us! Friday is Picture Day. Please let me know if you need a new order form. Also, the book order is due tomorrow.

Reading
     We are beginning a new unit this week. We will study characters' role in a variety of texts. We will learn about character traits and how to support our thinking using textual evidence. We will also use characters' actions and dialog to infer character traits. During this unit we will read The Tale of Despereaux, by Kate DiCamillo.

Writing
     In addition to working on our personal narrative unit we will begin a mini-unit on paragraph writing. Our work will include how to write a focused topic sentence, a body, and a closing sentence. We will also practice writing complete paragraphs together. My hope is to begin putting our Friday Letters into paragraphs this week.

Science
    We will begin our Plant Growth and Development unit this week. We will be planting our seeds this week and we will set-up our observation journals.

Social Studies
     We will complete our Maps and Globe unit this week. We will finish making our globes, explore the different types of maps, and create a landform dictionary.

Math
    We took a test our first math test on Friday. This test will come home tomorrow. I am asking that students correct their mistakes, have a parent sign the test, and return it to me by Friday. This week we will learn how to round numbers to the nearest ten and hundred. We will also estimate sums and differences. We will also play some place value games to keep our newly learned skills sharp.

Word Work
     We will conclude our work with nouns this week, by learning the remaining rules for plural nouns. We will also work with words in the "-at" pattern.

Finally, this month we will be focusing on the second trait from the Seven Habits of Happy Kids. Our focus with this trait will be goal setting in the classroom.

Some photos from our time with George Steele.

Thank you to our Mystery Reader, Mr. Tuman.